Here at Econsultancy we post a lot of tweets. Last month we published a whopping 153 articles on the blog alone, and that doesn't take into account tweets about events, training, reports or random conversations about Ben twerking with Google Glass.

We don't want to flood or annoy our followers, so we spend a lot of time working out which content you want to see, optimising our headlines and subject matter, and hopefully mixing depth of content with the odd link-bait headline.

We also want new followers to join the conversation, and ultimately, we'd like followers to visit the site and engage with the content here.

In order to compare effectiveness I added an image to our regular weekly ’10 interesting digital marketing statistics we’ve seen this week’ tweet, then benchmarked it against the posts from previous weeks.

Let's take a look at the stats for the last five posts:

The tweet at the top included an image and... well, doesn't do much really.

It's not the lowest performing, but neither is it the highest. Granted the other posts have had a little longer to get out and about, but I don’t expect the figures to rocket upwards.

52% of agencies now offer a 'full range of digital marketing services'.

And as we’ve learned from experience, if you talk about agencies, then agencies tend to talk about you, and themselves (no offence agencies, that’s your job after all) and the comments on the post reflect that this was the conversation starter.

With no measurable effects, I took the question to Twitter to see what our followers had to say:

We received an interesting array of answers. Most respondents said that they would be more likely to open a tweet with an image attached, but many added provisos:

When adding images, consider the viewing experience

It’s fair to assume that @Econsultancy has a larger-than-average proportion of pro tweeters following, who are more likely to be utilising apps like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite.

When they are readily displayed, the images certainly stand out more:

Over on Twitter for desktop or mobile however, images are hidden:

Context, context, context:

Even if they’re in the right ‘browser’, the tweet itself matters. People won’t click on a link if they don’t know what it is, so making sure you have framing and context is hugely important.

“Check this chart out: Just 20% of businesses tie data collection to business objectives http://mypicture”.

Even if you're a trusted source, hacks do happen, so your followers still want to make sure that link won't whisk them away to visit the Nigerian Prince's Bank Account.

With that said, there’s something to be said for piquing peoples' curiosity:

But again, context rules. For Twitter accounts dealing with a broader audience, this could be the winner, as it works well with more playful or conversational content:

The call to action requires only that the user look at the image, not that they visit an extra external page, so use images to encourage conversation and awareness within Twitter.

Adding extra links to push people to other parts of the web will look messy. Try something like “Guess who we saw outside Econsultancy towers earlier? LINK".

(For those of you who clicked that link, I am deeply sorry to admit that we didn't actually see a time-travelling 1970s Grandmaster Flash outside earlier. I promise that's the only untruth in this post).

In other words, we’re back to our old friend User Experience.

Good UX should go everywhere

Even if you’re utilising someone else’s platform, you need to make the process as painless and straightforward as possible.

We’ve written before about the art of optimising tweets, and this is no exception. It’s also worth remembering that being able to include images this way is still fairly new, so there’s a certain novelty value (and if you want to keep it that way, best not to go overboard on images, and do consider alternative types of media such as Vine and video in general) which may initially increase engagement.

Overall it appears that images in tweets can increase actions on Twitter, but only if used in a specific way that may well be separate from your usual Twitter actions.

If you’ve been using images or other media regularly then do please let me know what effect it has had in the comments.

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Comments (5)

It'd be interesting to see you extend the experiment to Twitter Cards. We've played around with them and initial results indicate higher engagement but we don't have your volumes, so any chance you could give it a try?

UX-wise, the cards do offer users a compelling additional content layer. But does it translate into numbers? Love to know!

over 4 years ago

Heather Stark, Director at Kinran Limited

I was just thinking the other day it was too bad you couldn't MVT your tweets. Here's another example of that...! There are lots of potential interactions with content type that would be best addressed in this way.

over 4 years ago

Steve Morgan, Freelance SEO Consultant at Morgan Online Marketing

Great post, Matt.

Was that the only test that you ran? I'd say that given it was the 5th time you tweeted it and it's a month after it was published, that's a respectable number of RTs/faves. I know that if I clicked-through and saw that it was an older post, I might be less inclined to share it. Also, some of your other followers might've recognised it from before, and thought not to RT it for that reason (or maybe they already had done)!

You also say that it's "not the lowest performing," but it does get the lowest number of click-throughs (through to the article, that is - not including the pic). Depends on what you determine to be success though: clicks vs. RTs.

Why not run another experiment where the 2nd time you tweet it it has the pic? I'd be curious to know if it gets more clicks/RTs/faves that the original!

over 4 years ago

KJ

Great one Matt!

As they say, 'one size does not fit all' - one rule does not apply to all. The way one uses any communication platform is very subjective. The content needs to be tailored to what they want to communicate, the target, brand 'tone' etc. For some, images might work well and for the rest, it might not.

Totally agree with your overview.

BTW, can you please let me know which Twitter analytics tool are you using. Appreciate it.

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